Tycoon Tests Africa's Business Limits

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323687604578469201586515408

LAGOS, Nigeria—Three years ago, Africa's richest businessman planned to build his first factory outside his home country of Nigeria. Today, the cement plant remains a half-constructed shell on a Senegalese meadow as courts consider competing claims between the industrialist and the descendants of a Muslim holy man.

Aliko Dangote's cement company has flourished in Nigeria, helping to turn him into the continent's most wealthy industrialist. But the stalled Senegalese venture foreshadows what awaits Mr. Dangote and the rest of Africa's crop of multinational entrepreneurs as they expand beyond their home countries.

"It's not really been easy," the Dangote Group chief executive says in his office here, facing a wall-size map of Africa.

Like Africa's other aspiring multinational businessmen, Mr. Dangote is colliding with red tape and foreign competition in Africa's small-but-fast-growing markets. Their outward marches will test whether homegrown African businesses can compete against big foreign companies on the continent.

For nearly two decades, Mr. Dangote (pronounced DAHN go tay) thrived on Nigeria's tilted playing field. The country's past three presidents, whom Mr. Dangote counts as friends, restricted the flow of cement through the nation's ports. That lifted prices, along with Dangote Group's earnings. Nigerian cement sales drove Dangote's profit 24% higher last year to $1.9 billion, the company says.

Mr. Dangote wants to persuade other countries to tighten their ports, too, hoping to push up import prices and steer Africa's economic growth toward industry and away from consumption. It is a message he has taken into the roughly 20 African countries he is targeting for investment, aiming to build "the most profitable cement company ever," he says.

His expansion plans highlight a pivotal moment for business on the continent. A handful of African banks, retailers and cellphone companies are busting out of their home countries to ply products and services across the continent. South African telecom MTN Group Ltd. MTN.JO +0.43% , Togo-based Ecobank Transnational Inc. and South African retailer Massmart Holdings Ltd. MSM.JO +0.20% , a unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT -0.38% lead the pack.

But industrial endeavors like Mr. Dangote's are still rare—and that is no surprise.

Kenyan power-equipment manufacturer Transcentury Ltd. opened a factory next door in Tanzania. But the operation has struggled to keep up with power cables offloaded from ships that came from China. Kenya's Bidco Oil Referies Ltd. built a cooking-oil plant in Tanzania—but that factory has been undercut by Asian imports, too.

Mr. Dangote has experienced similar setbacks. His textiles business had to close shop when Chinese garment mills began large-scale shipments to Nigeria. That worked out well for him; he turned to the cement industry in the 1990s just as construction began to boom.

Elsewhere, Africa's dictatorships were crumbling and democratic governments were abandoning socialist plans for top-down industrial development. To curry favor with foreign investors—and to appease poor voters clamoring for inexpensive imports—many governments relaxed import restrictions and unleashed a flood of goods from abroad.

But Africa's most populous—and oil-rich—country held firm to restrictions on international trade.

That has left Nigeria's retail price for cement among the world's highest, at $200 a metric ton, analysts say. Mr. Dangote says the environment has allowed him to make investments that have created jobs and made him a symbol of Nigerian aspiration.

Forbes pegs his net worth at $16 billion. A pop tune here, "Aliko Dangote Special," declares, "Cover of Forbes, he no be joke."

But Mr. Dangote so far hasn't been able to leverage that star power to persuade other African governments to ban, tax or otherwise limit cement imports from overseas.

Many countries have French-owned cement factories that are the legacy of colonial ties. Yet several of those have closed or scaled back amid a recent flood of inexpensive imports.

And restricting imports as Mr. Dangote has urged risks angering China, an important investor in Africa. China's trade with the continent hit $200 billion last year, according to Beijing.

And then there is Senegal.

Mr. Dangote has said his plant there would create 4,000 jobs. But Senegalese courts have ruled that his factory encroaches on a sacred forest owned by the grandchildren of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, whom millions of Senegalese consider a Muslim messiah. Local belief holds that he once drank tea with the Prophet Muhammad and floated across the Atlantic Ocean on a prayer rug.

Mr. Dangote ascribes the rulings to less-divine intervention. French Presidents François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy each lobbied his Senegalese counterpart to protect a local cement plant owned by France's Ciments Vicat, Mr. Dangote says. "The Senegalese, they dance to the tune of the French."

Abdou Abdel Thiam, a spokesman for Senegalese President Macky Sall, says the government didn't interfere in the litigation but also rules out a Nigeria-style block on imports. "Senegal is a free country," Mr. Thiam says.

In his office, Mr. Dangote predicts he soon will start selling cement in Senegal at just a razor-thin profit. "We've taken this thing very personally," he says.

On his desk a plaque reads, "Nothing Is Impossible."

—Patrick McGroarty in Johannesburg contributed to this article.